The structuring of awareness that becomes dreaming is a process that finds its unexpected analog in our waking awareness.

In effect, the structure of our mind, habits and choices affects awareness in such a way as to ‘fold and weave’ experience from stimuli. This is not precisely dreaming, and yet, the two are astonishingly similar.

I have never had the direct awareness of this until just now. I have heard stories about it, and half-believed them. But now, for the first time, I have seen it happening. Waking life is nothing like our ideas about it. While it is not dreaming, per se… the two have more in common that we believe, and both affect a third process of which most of us have precious little direct experience… this ‘third thing’ is that which is being folded, informed, and directed by the unique activity of our minds in both states (and often those in-between). It is awareness or consciousness itself, a sort of exotic dreamfluid which these activities forms and extends into what we ordinarily understand as ‘experience’ or presence.